Benjamin McGee is a husband, father, software developer, and aspiring writer. His work appears regularly in his own dreams. Several prominent notebooks, floppy disks, and hard drives have also featured his short stories. He currently resides.

Jacob looked back towards the sea and his eyes filled with tears. He knew the burn would happen soon. When he held the chart to the evening sky the moon almost filled the hole at the center. He kept adjusting the longitude and latitude slides, hoping to find an error. Each time his calculations were confirmed. The burn would come in the next day or two. He trudged up the steep trails. His supply of sweet bread and wine from the seaside village was now gone. Once again he was eating the hard blackberries of his homeland and trying to catch the greasy rats that ran among the rocks.

Jacob gathered branches from the scrubby bushes and made a fire for the night. "Maybe it will happen tonight," he thought, "Maybe I won't have to watch." Not one of the people in the village had believed his story.

In his fitful sleep he dreamed of a beautiful place so different from his home. The first day played itself over and over in his mind. The fishers with their boats so full of sea creatures that they scraped the sandy bottom of the harbor. The singing of the village folk as they tugged on the ropes bringing the catch in. A small boy nearly toppled by a huge fish let out a cry of joy and laughter.

With that scream the people began to crumble in Jacob's dream. His hostess Freida crumbled like ancient stone. He tried to scream but he had no voice and these grand people, these people so unlike any he had ever known, turned to dust. He wept for them and his sorrow echoed from the empty stone buildings all around.

That morning he awoke to the violent shaking of the ground. His first instinct was to grab the chart from his pack and check the calculations. Then he saw it. Horror filled him as the tremors rocked the planet. The sun rose over the ocean and the ocean retreated. Just as the obelisk in the monastery had predicted, the framework of the world was exposed and the ocean was completely swallowed. Jacob watched for a long time until the bare bones of the planet were all that he could see. A glistening grid of metal bars with the bright morning sun washing over them. An arc of fire shot from the planet's core into the emptiness of space.

The orbit now stabilized, the oceans would return, and the planet would continue its journey around the sun. Jacob muttered his prayer, "Live not in the low lands, for those that do will be shaken to dust and consumed by fire." He picked up his chart and began to plot the next burn.